Since I gave you a phone it’s not rape

As evidence of UN peacekeepers’ sexual violence against
Black African women and girls grows, media reporting and research reinterprets
this as ‘transactional sex’, through the logic of colonialism.

Credit: Predatory Peacekeepers

A few months ago, the campaign #predatorypeacekeepers started on
social media. It followed a report from a Canadian AIDS charity accusing UN and
French troops in the Central African Republic (CAR) of sexually abusing at
least 98 girls. The damning report alleged that three girls had been
tied up and forced to have sex with a dog, that one of the victims subsequently
died and that many of the abuses were orchestrated by a French General. Since
publication, more victims have come forward. Many spoke of degrading sexual
acts including soldiers urinating on the victim’s body or in her mouth.

Allegations of sexual misconduct by UN soldiers have been documented in most
of the countries where UN peacekeeping troops serve. However, what seems striking
in CAR is the alleged involvement of senior officers and the age of the victims. In December 2015, an Independent Panel produced scathing findings on the way the UN had
responded to the allegations in CAR. It identified systematic failures and
highlighted a culture of impunity, inadequate investigatory mechanisms and unsatisfactory
structures to support victims. There has
been no public update by the UN on the progress made in implementing the
recommendations of the Panel. The few
prosecutions have exclusively been of (Black) African Peacekeepers. White predatory
peacekeepers, it appears avoid accountability.

‘Transactional sex’ and fallacy of consent

Both social and
legal definitions of rape are centred, if only partly, on the notion of
consent. One way to nullify rape is to establish consent or to effectively blur
its boundaries. This is achieved in relation to the victims of predatory
peacekeepers when sexual relations between Black/African women and UN soldiers are
described as transactional. In ‘transactional
sex’, one party gets sexual access to another person’s body in exchange for gifts
and/or other goods. As there is a material
gain (usually for the women) consent is thus deemed to be present. Any quick internet search reveals that the media
has been awash with headlines of transactional sex.

Reporting sex in
exchange of goods, and luxury goods and/or mobile phones, in particular does more than
imply consent. It invites public judgements around the morality of the victims
and, reproduces ‘misogynoirist’ associations between black womanhood and
materialism. This taps into implicit prejudices and bias and
reduces cognitive dissonance. The last link above, by Cage, refers to a research project conducted
in 2012 on the prevalence of this so called ‘transactional sex’ in Monrovia (Liberia)
during the civil war. The study estimates that 58 000 women aged between 18 and
30 had engaged in ‘transactional sex’ with UN personnel at some point and that over half were below
18 on the first occasion. Despite this,
the words rape or consent are notably absent in this piece. Similarly, allegations in Haiti involved
children but again media reports of ‘transactional sex’ were written with no
reflection on the presumption of consent.

Credit: Predatory Peacekeepers

Age differences are a major
source power differential, which is just one of the reasons why sexual offences
against minors are specified in most penal codes. Given that such offences exist in most nations it is
extraordinary that the potential that such acts might be sexual abuse of
children is rarely broached. In addition to age, a number of
contextual constraints should lead to questions about the validity of consent.

The power differentials - social, legal, institutional and even symbolic - between
the Black/ African women and UN soldiers create a number of barriers to their
capacity to give meaningful consent. Differences
in ‘social class’ and geo-political positioning, in race, in emotional
vulnerability – let’s not forget we are talking about women in war or otherwise
environmentally precarious zones – soldiers’ holding and/or having access to
heavy artillery and guns, each and cumulatively make consent impossible to give
freely. Presumably, it is for these reasons that the UN banned its
peacekeepers from engaging in ‘transactional sex’.

Whiteness and the
rape-ability of Black/African girls and women

An intersectional
approach is needed to grasp the particular sexual subjugation of Black/African
women by western or western commissioned men, and the media’s apparent
determination to impute consent onto them. It also avoids a decontextualized
account which unwittingly reproduces violence in ways central to the white
patriarchal colonial order: here African and Black woman appear as inferior and
subordinated, yet that very subordination is rendered invisible. This process normalises
gendered and racialised violence whilst making it impossible to name whiteness
as the key underlying structure.

But, whiteness
is engaged here. It is engaged in the structural invisibilisation of the Black/African
victims and in the failure to hold white perpetrators to account. It is engaged
in the presentation of Black bodies as sites for white expressions of sadism
and sexual perversion, and in the reproduction of gendered racialised
hierarchies. The social construction of
Black women’s sexuality as ‘promiscuous’ and depraved has a long colonial
history which continues to lead to an unwillingness, conscious or otherwise, to
protect black girls/women’s bodies from sexual assault and rape.

At the core of
our presumed suitability for violent sexual consumption or rape-ability, is not
only our constructed hyper-sexuality but also ideas of dirt and impurity –
markers of course of our inhumanity – victims of predatory peacekeepers could
be perversely sexually violated and soiled (with urine) because their bodies
were deemed impure. This implicit responsibility
is both the cause and effect of their worthlessness. And so, sexual contact with men constructed as
superior, as noble saviours willing to touch the Black body, cannot possibly be
violent. Rape almost becomes envisaged
as a gift, which should be gratefully received.
Indeed this dynamic is symbolised and materialised by each so called ‘transaction’.
One may even wonder, had there been no crude act of violence or no report of
women and girls being tied-up, whether the term rape might even have been used
at all in CAR.

Under colonialism African childhood and womanhood were
aggressively denied as part of a conscious effort to dehumanise. Remnants of this system of
oppression continue to shape the treatment of black people today, with those at
the bottom of the hierarchy of blackness, being the most disposable. Indeed, the impunity which surrounds the abuse
by western men of third world black bodies exemplifies this. Speaking of
‘transactional sex’ is, therefore, both a vehicle for old colonial notions and
a way for predatory peacekeepers to resist accountability for their rape and
sexual exploitation of children and of vulnerable women. However, given that recent
evidence suggests almost half of the British public sees colonialism
as something to be proud of and, that about a third consider that ‘we talk too much about the cruelty and
racism of Empire, and ignore the good that it did’, then no
doubt mass murder/mutilation can be offset against any purported ‘economic
development’. Under this logic, perhaps being given a mobile phone can
be seen to constitute consent and even rape can be offset against ‘lifestyle
improvements’.

Guilaine Kinouaniis an intersectional
feminist, an equality consultant, a therapist and writer. Her analyses are
rooted in her social location as a Black French woman, a migrant, and a (proud)
child of the Banlieue with solid roots in Africa. She is currently completing her doctorate in Clinical
Psychology.

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